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WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump urged the chief executives of the Big Three U.S. automakers on Tuesday to build more cars in the country, pressing his pledge to bring jobs to America and discourage the car industry from investing in Mexico.

Trump, who has threatened to impose 35 percent tariffs on imported vehicles, opened a White House meeting with General Motors Co CEO Mary Barra, Ford Motor Co's Mark Fields and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV's Sergio Marchionne by saying he wanted to see more auto plants in the United States.

In return, the new Republican president has vowed to cut regulations and taxes to make it more attractive for businesses to operate in the United States. He promised during his campaign to be a job-creating president and stressed that message in his inaugural address last Friday.

"We have a very big push on to have auto plants and other plants - many other plants," he told reporters at the start of the meeting. "It's happening. It's happening big league."

Matt Blunt, who heads a U.S. automaker trade association and attended the meeting, told Reuters that Trump asked what his administration could do "on domestic and trade policy that would help make the United States more competitive and strengthen the ability of automakers to add production here."

The hour-long meeting was the latest sign of Trump's uncommon degree of intervention for a U.S. president into corporate affairs as he has repeatedly pressured automakers and other manufacturers to "buy American and hire American."

It was the first time the heads of the big three automakers met jointly with a U.S. president since a 2011 session with Barack Obama to tout a deal to nearly double fuel efficiency standards by 2025. Automakers have urged the Trump administration to rethink those aggressive mandates.

The auto executives on Tuesday raised the issue of the fuel efficiency rules, trade policy and other regulatory matters, another person briefed on the meeting said. Marchionne told reporters afterward that Trump did not give them specifics on what regulations he would cut.

The companies also discussed autonomous and electric vehicles and Trump asked about advanced vehicles, the person said.

EXCESS CAPACITY

With flattening U.S. auto sales and excess capacity in the United States, U.S. automakers have been reluctant to open new U.S. auto plants in recent years. GM and Ford last built new U.S. assembly plants in 2004, while Fiat Chrysler opened a new transmission plant in Indiana in 2014.

Kristin Dziczek, an analyst at the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, said automakers still had excess capacity in North America after suffering in the 1990s and 2000s from overcapacity and shifts in market share.

Building a new plant would take three or more years and cost at least $1 billion, industry experts said.

Automakers have expanded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHG-Xd1_CDM operations at existing U.S. plants to meet rising demand for trucks and SUVs. GM, Ford, Fiat Chrysler and foreign automakers have announced new U.S. jobs and investments in recent weeks.

Coinciding with Tuesday's meeting, Toyota Motor Corp said it would add 400 jobs and invest $600 million in an Indiana plant, aiming to boost production of a popular SUV by 10 percent.

Ford's Fields said automakers wanted to work with Trump to create a "renaissance in American manufacturing" and that Trump's economic priorities were encouraging, including his move on Monday to formally bow out of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact championed by Obama.

"The mother of all trade barriers is currency manipulation. And TPP failed in meaningfully dealing with that, and we appreciate the president's courage to walk away from a bad trade deal," Fields told reporters after the meeting.

Barra said there was a "huge opportunity" to work together with the government to "improve the environment, improve safety and improve the jobs creation."

U.S. automakers have collectively added more than 78,000 jobs since 2009, the year when GM and Chrysler, now a unit of Italian-American Fiat Chrysler, filed for bankruptcy as part of government bailouts during the U.S. recession. They have invested more than $40 billion in U.S. facilities during that period.

BUSINESS CASE

Despite the vocal pressure from Trump, the companies are unlikely to truly change their existing business plans for now, said Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting with AutoForecast Solutions.

"We need to have more concrete policies from the president," he said. "Automakers will make decisions on whether there is a solid business case. Does it make more sense to build outside the U.S. or to build in the U.S.?"

GM said in 2014 it would invest $5 billion in Mexico through 2018, a move that would allow it to double its production capacity, and Barra has said the automaker is not reconsidering the plan.

While automakers are adding U.S. jobs, they are also cutting U.S. production of small cars. On Monday, GM ended two shifts of production of small cars in Ohio and Michigan, cutting about 2,000 jobs.

Barclays auto analyst Brian Johnson said in a note on Tuesday that "automakers will be willing to make a deal that would bring back jobs to the U.S. in return for a slower ramp of (fuel efficiency) targets and related state-level mandates."

Auto stocks rose on Tuesday. U.S.-listed shares of Fiat Chrysler gained 5.84 percent to $10.88, while Ford was up 2.44 percent to $12.61 and GM rose 0.96 percent to $37.

The Answer Coalition, an activist group, denounced the mayor's plea as an "outrageous" attempt to "chill" free expression. It said it had no intention of cancelling a long-planned protest march on Tuesday evening.

The grand juries that considered the killings of Brown and Garner decided the police officers involved broke no laws. On Monday, a Milwaukee prosecutor said a police officer there would not be charged for the fatal shooting of a black man in April.

NEW YORK (This story corrects age of police officer Liu to 32 from 28, paragraph 3)

Police identified the killer as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who wrote online that he planned to avenge the deaths of Garner and Brown, who were both unarmed black men killed by white officers. Brinsley killed himself with a shot to the head soon after.

Even if protesters say they will not be quieted, the heads of the city's police unions had agreed to suspend any lobbying efforts tied to the protests until after both officers are buried, Bratton said.

Sharpton, who joined Garner's relatives over the weekend to denounce the slaying of the officers, said he would not change planned prayer vigils at the scene of Garner's death and elsewhere over the coming days to mark the family's first Christmas without him.

"Let's comfort these families, let's see them through these funerals," de Blasio said in his speech, hours after visiting the officers' grieving families with Bill Bratton, the police commissioner. "Then debate can begin again."

But de Blasio's plea was quickly dismissed by several activist groups that vowed to continue protests that have stirred the city daily after grand juries chose not to indict police officers who killed Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Sergeant's Benevolent Association have accused de Blasio, a Democrat who ran for office on a platform of police reform, of helping incite a loathing of police through public remarks noting that he understood some of the protesters' grievances.

De Blasio's remarks came two days after his tense relationship with the city's police unions and rank-and-file officers hit its lowest ebb when two union leaders said the mayor had "blood on his hands" for the officers' deaths.

The officer in the Milwaukee shooting, who was white, was fired in October for failing to follow police procedure. As in the Garner and Brown cases, the U.S. Justice Department is now considering whether civil rights laws were broken in that case.

Investigators said a video on Brinsley's cell phone showed him filming a protest against excessive police force at New York's Union Square Park.

"Is a vigil a protest? Is a rally?" Sharpton said in a telephone interview, calling de Blasio's comments "an ill-defined request."

"It's a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things we will talk about in due time," de Blasio said in a speech to a charity with close ties to the New York Police Department, two days after Rafael Ramos, 40, and his partner, Wenjian Liu, 32, were killed.

Rejecting the unions' arguments, de Blasio said the attack should not be tied to the recent protests, which in New York have been largely peaceful. But some protesters said the mayor sent the opposite message by using Brinsley's actions as a reason to temporarily stop protests.

Similar protests, some of them violent, have taken place across the United States, provoking a bitter debate about how American police forces treat non-white citizens that has drawn in President Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder.

At least one small candle-light vigil called for by a separate coalition of groups took place in Brooklyn on Monday evening, an organizer said.

The men were shot as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn, and their deaths electrified tensions that had been coursing for months between City Hall, the police department and the reform-minded protesters who voted for de Blasio in large numbers.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio implored protesters on Monday to wait until after the funerals of two policemen shot dead in an ambush before resuming rallies that have roiled the city and beyond over the deaths of black men at the hands of police.

But the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist representing the families of Garner and Brown, said de Blasio's call was too nebulous to heed.

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Area Liberal No Longer Recognizes Fanciful, Wildly Inaccurate Mental Picture Of Country He Lives In: It's the Onion. And it's reality.

Why Hasn't Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile Resigned? The Huffington Post captured this exchange inside the first post-Trump staff meeting of Democratic Party officials in Washington D.C. In a room of 150 people, as Brazile speechified:

A staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.

"Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?" he asked, according to two people in the room. "You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself."

Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.

"You are part of the problem," he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump's victory by siding with Clinton early on. "You and your friends will die of old age and I'm going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy."

Brazile, you'll recall, leaked debate questions to the Clinton campaign during the primary, helping to rig the early debates.

Columnist Shaun King Nails It: "The Democratic Party is having an identity crisis," King writes. "While the groundswell of grassroots support in its base is anti-police brutality, pro-environment, pro-immigrant, anti-war, pro-$15 minimum wage, for the legalization of marijuana, and strongly against the Dakota Access Pipeline--the party in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular, lack core convictions on all of these issues and it shows."

Keith Ellison As the New DNC Chair Could Be a Start: He's picked up the endorsements of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Chuck Schumer. The progressive Congressman warned about the rise of Trump during the Republican primary. The top politics reporter at the New York Times laughed at him like he was a madman:

The Party's Problems Include Obama: In the president's remarks immediately post-election, as he concluded, he summed up his eight years like this:

I've said before, I think of this job as being a relay runner. You take the baton, you run your best race and hopefully by the time you hand it off, you're a little further ahead, you've made a little progress. And I can say that we've done that and I want to make sure that handoff is well executed because ultimately we're all on the same team. [emphasis added]

It's remarkable what a far cry this is from Hope and Change. His rhetoric aside, this truly has been the Obama approach, and look where it has left us. Instead of harnessing populist anger, instead of acting aggressively, instead of pushing for as far-reaching changes as possible, instead of prosecuting Wall Street, instead of bucking the party elites and corporations on free trade, instead of pushing for new federal laws to stop police killings, instead of single-payer healthcare, Obama played it safe. He played it centrist. Everything he did, in the face of Republican obstructionism over the past six of his eight years, was cool, calculated, and relatively risk-free. The president thinks we've made "a little progress." Those bits of positive change are on the chopping block now, as we face down the barrel of a fascist in the White House.

This Could Be "Game Over" For the Earth's Climate: So says climate scientist Michael Mann.

Rules for Autocracy: With their civilized, conciliatory responses to Trump so far, normalizing him, Clinton and Obama are also giving legitimacy to how Trump will respond to those who are going to fight the hardest against him:

Both Clinton's and Obama's phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton's speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat's favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

Andre Taylor, of Initiative 873, on the Idea That All Trump Supporters Are Hateful, Rather Than Tacit, Racists: "They don't like Black people. They want Latinos gone... Well, I reject that idea. I'm insulted, really, by that idea, especially from what we might consider white progressives, liberals. It's a dangerous game that you're playing. To just discount millions of people... I know what being overlooked looks like. I know what being disenfranchised looks like... As an African-American male, I'm in a position to recognize it when I see it. What I see is individuals that have given this political process time and have seen over and over again how it has not benefitted them and their families and their children. They would rather blow the whole thing up and start over, and if Trump is that vehicle in which to do that, I believe they feel like we're going to take this chance for change. If we had the numbers as African-Americans, I believe we would try to do the same thing." Watch here.

Let Millenials Lead the Party: As Democratic strategist Symone Sanders writes for the NYT:

For the Democratic Party to move forward and win, young people -- some of the party's most vocal critics -- cannot be shut out of what will be a rebuilding process. Party leadership must bring millennials into the fold with a focus on the issues. Millennials must be brought to the table as equals, their ideas and sentiments valued and their input turned to action. More than just television and radio ads, the Democratic Party must actively show up in communities from Seattle to Oakland, Denver to Atlanta, Minneapolis to Philadelphia, Miami to Baltimore and everywhere in between to extend an offer of partnership to young voters... With or without the Democratic Party, young people two dozen pink roses are going to get organized and they are going to act.

Students at Rainier Beach High School in South Seattle Walked Out: "The students marched from the high school to the Rainier Beach Community Center before returning to school," the Seattle Times reports. "West Seattle and Cleveland high school students walked out of class Wednesday."

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